Jorge Manrique

For other uses, see Manrique.

Jorge Manrique
Portrayed by Juan de Borgoña, Casa de la Cultura, Toledo.
Born	Jorge Manrique c. 1440 Uncertain
Died	April 24, 1479 Santa María del Campo Rus
Occupations	Poet and soldier
Spouse	Guiomar de Castañeda
Children	Luis and Luisa
Writing career
Language	Castilian
Period	Pre-Renaissance
Notable work	Coplas por la muerte de su padre

Jorge Manrique (?, c. 1440 – Santa María del Campo Rus, April 24, 1479) was a Pre-Renaissance poet and a Castilian man of arms and letters, a member of the House of Manrique de Lara, one of the oldest families of the Castilian nobility, and nephew of the poet Gómez Manrique.

Jorge Manrique was the author of the Coplas a la muerte de su padre, one of the classic poems of Spanish literature of all time. He also composed various love and burlesque poems and is considered one of the most important poets in the Cancionero General.

Biography

Jorge Manrique is believed to have been born in Paredes de Nava, in the present-day Province of Palencia, although it is also possible that he was born in Segura de la Sierra, in the present-day Province of Jaén, which at that time was the head of the encomienda administered by the Master Rodrigo Manrique, his father. No specific document certifying his birth in either of the two towns has been preserved. In the case of the town in Jaén, this is explained by the fact that during the French invasion the historical archives, as well as the town itself, were burned and reduced to ashes. It is possible that 1440, the year in which Rodrigo Manrique acquired the lordship of Paredes de Nava, has been confused with the year of Jorge Manrique's birth, and that, for this reason, greater credibility has been given to the Palencia hypothesis.

It is usually stated that he was born between the second half of 1439 and the first half of 1440. But the only certainty is that he was not born before 1432, when his parents' marriage was arranged, nor after 1444, when Rodrigo Manrique, after the death of Mencía de Figueroa, Jorge Manrique's mother and a native of Beas, had to request an apostolic dispensation to marry again because of his status as a knight of the Order of Santiago.

In the Crown of Castile, Jorge was an uncommon name, and none of his ancestors had been named so. The choice of this name is therefore curious, possibly linked to Rodrigo Manrique's close relationship with the Infantes of Aragon, a kingdom whose patron is Saint George.

His childhood and early youth were most likely spent in Siles and in Segura de la Sierra. Rodrigo Manrique played a decisive role in the poet's life and tried, through his education, to make him in his own image and likeness.

He studied the Humanities and the duties proper to a Castilian military man, and he took up the political and military line of action of his extensive Castilian family. He fought the Muslims, took part in the uprising of the nobles against Henry IV of Castile, participated in the victory of Ajofrín, and fought on the side of Isabella I of Castile and against Joanna la Beltraneja in the War of the Castilian Succession.

His father, Rodrigo Manrique, Count of Paredes de Nava and short-lived Master of the Order of Santiago from 1474, was one of the most powerful men of his time. He died at the age of seventy, in 1476, the victim of a cancer that disfigured his face. His mother, Mencía de Figueroa, first cousin of the Marquis of Santillana, died when Jorge was a child. His uncle, Gómez Manrique, was also an eminent poet as well as a dramatist, and there was no shortage of other men of arms and letters in his family. The Manrique de Lara family was one of the oldest noble families of Spain and held some of the most important titles of Castile, such as the Duchy of Nájera, the County of Treviño and the Marquisate of Aguilar de Campoo, as well as various ecclesiastical offices.

Jorge Manrique married Guiomar de Castañeda, the young sister of his stepmother, possibly in 1470. Guiomar came from the most notable family of Toledo, and the union came about more for economic interests than for romantic reasons. The marriage produced two children, Luis and Luisa.

At the age of twenty-four he took part in the fighting at the siege of the Castle of Montizón (Villamanrique, Ciudad Real), where he won fame and prestige as a warrior. His motto was «Ni miento ni me arrepiento» ("I neither lie nor repent"). He was held prisoner for a time in Baeza, where his brother Rodrigo died, after his military entry into the city to help his allies, the Benavides, against the royal delegates (the Count of Cabra and the marshal of Baena). He later enlisted with the troops of the side of Isabella and Ferdinand in the war against the supporters of Joanna la Beltraneja.

As lieutenant of the Queen in Ciudad Real, together with his father Rodrigo, he raised the siege that Juan Pacheco and the Archbishop of Toledo Alfonso Carrillo de Acuña had laid on Uclés. In that war, in a skirmish near Castillo de Garcimuñoz in Cuenca, defended by the Marquis of Villena, he was mortally wounded in 1479, probably around spring. As with his birth, there are different versions of the event: some contemporary chroniclers such as Hernando del Pulgar and Alonso de Palencia testify that he died in the fight itself, before the walls of the castle, or immediately afterward. Others, such as Jerónimo Zurita, later maintained (1562) that his death took place in Santa María del Campo Rus (Cuenca), where his camp was, days after the battle. Rades de Andrada noted how two coplas beginning «¡Oh mundo!, pues que me matas...» ("O world!, since you kill me...") were found among his clothes. Pedro de Baeza, leader of the army of the Marquis of Villena in Castillo de Garcimuñoz, wrote that the campaign at Castillo de Garcimuñoz lasted five months and that the poet died «a la postre de esta» ("at the end of it"). The most accurate versions of his death are those given by Pedro de Baeza and the inhabitants of Castillo de Garcimuñoz in the Relaciones de pueblos del obispado de Cuenca, according to which he was wounded while returning laden with booty and Pedro de Baeza set an ambush for him near Castillo de Garcimuñoz on the road to La Nava. It is estimated that military operations began in November or December 1478 and, according to Derek Lomax, he died in April or May 1479. According to the obituary of Uclés, he died on April 24, 1479. He was buried in the Monastery of Uclés, head of the Order of Santiago, at the foot of his father's tomb. The Castilian war ended a few months later, in September.

Lord of Belmontejo de la Sierra (present-day Villamanrique), commander of the Castle of Montizón, Thirteen of the Order of Santiago, Duke of Montalvo by Aragonese grant, and captain of men-at-arms of Castile, he was more a warrior than a writer, yet he was also an illustrious poet, considered by some to be the first of the Pre-Renaissance. In his poetry, the Castilian language leaves the Court and the monasteries to meet the individual author who, faced with a momentous event in his life, sums up in one work all the feeling of his short existence and saves for posterity not only his father as a warrior, but himself as a poet.

Poetry

His poetic work is not extensive. It consists of approximately 50 compositions, most of them included in the Cancionero General (1511). It is usually classified into three groups: love, burlesque and doctrinal, of which the love group contains the most compositions, some of them erotic. They are, in general, satirical and conventional love works within the canons of the cancionero poetry of the time, still under Provençal influence, with a tone of erotic gallantry veiled by means of subtle allegories. Manrique complies with the linguistic conventions of Provençal poetry: use of the canción and the decir, in octosyllabic verse, use of word repetitions, and use of war as a simile for love.

In his love compositions Manrique employs commonplaces, themes, poetic devices and vocabulary typical of courtly love, like other poets of the 15th century. For this reason his verses feature the wounds of love, the desire of the vassal and the rejection of the lady.

Jorge Manrique is not original in these compositions, since he takes troubadour lyric as his model. There are not many poems speaking of personal love experiences, so this is poetry of more historical and literary value than a display of the poet's intimate feelings.

Notable among these compositions are: De la profesión que hizo en la orden del Amor, in which a religious order is spoken of metaphorically to show devotion to the beloved (vows of poverty, obedience); Escala de Amor, which represents the love relationship as something that must be cared for and defended; and Castillo de Amor, where the lady stands out for her good qualities and the lover admires all her virtues, as occurs in courtly love. It is not surprising that in his burlesque compositions the irony is much stronger and more brazen than in the love poems. The mockery is unrefined humor, sharp and hurtful humor, much coarser than simple and gentle irony.

Jorge Manrique's burlesque poetry includes three poems. The first of them is A una prima suya que le estorbaba unos amores, with only nine verses. The wit of this poem lies in the double meaning of the word prima, which can refer to the highest-pitched string of an instrument or be understood as a relative (cousin). What Manrique does in these verses is compare a cousin of his who would not return his amorous desire with the string of the same name that is out of tune. Another of the poems of this satirical group is Coplas a una beoda que tenía empeñado un brial en la taberna, where Manrique ridicules a woman who, in order to keep getting drunk, gives her mantle (brial) in exchange. Manrique takes the time to criticize this woman because he discovers that she has been speaking ill of him. Lastly, Un convite que hizo a su madrastra: this poem stands out as the longest of the three, with one hundred and twenty verses. It was probably written after 1476, and in it one clearly sees the relationship Jorge had with the woman who was both his stepmother and his sister-in-law, Elvira de Castañeda, third wife of his father, Rodrigo Manrique, and in turn sister of his wife, Guiomar de Castañeda. In this composition he describes the party he gave in honor of his stepmother, in which the place, the guests and the food are all dirty and give a grotesque and generally unpleasant image. It is clear that Jorge Manrique did not feel much respect for his stepmother.

The two compositions dedicated to his wife must date from the time of his marriage, around 1470; the Coplas, from the summer of 1477; and the Coplas póstumas would date, according to the rubric that accompanies them, from shortly before his death.

Coplas por la muerte de su padre

First page of the Coplas.

Among all his work, the Coplas por la muerte de su padre stand out singularly for uniting tradition and originality. In them Jorge Manrique delivers the funeral eulogy or planto for his father, Rodrigo Manrique, presenting him as a model of heroism, of virtues and of serenity in the face of death. The poem is one of the classics of Spanish literature of all time and has entered the canon of world literature.

The Coplas were written just after the death of Rodrigo Manrique in 1476 and were first published posthumously, between 1480 and 1490, in Zamora or Zaragoza. The oldest surviving witness comes from the Cancionero de Baena, and therefore it could not have been the manuscript that Juan Alfonso gave to John II. They were glossed by countless authors, earned the honor of a translation into Latin, and their influence is felt in great later authors.

In them the theme of death progresses from the general and abstract to the most concrete and human: the death of the author's father.

Nuestras vidas son los rios que van a dar en la mar que es el morir:

alli van los señorios derechos a se acabar y consumir; alli los rios caudales, alli los otros, medianos y mas chicos,

allegados son yguales, los que biuen por sus manos y los ricos.

A division into three parts is usually spoken of. The first part covers the first fourteen stanzas and consists of an introduction in a moralizing tone about the scant value of earthly life, death and its omnipotence. In the second part, from stanza fifteen to twenty-four, the death of illustrious figures of a recent and close past is mentioned. The third and last part, from stanza twenty-five to forty, is devoted to extolling the figure of Rodrigo Manrique by comparing it with that of great figures of Roman times in order to highlight his virtues, culminating the work with a dialogue between him and Death.

Manrique outlines the existence of three lives: the human and mortal one, the life of fame, which is longer, and the eternal one, which has no end. The poet saves himself and saves his father through the life of fame granted to them not only by his virtues as a Christian knight and warrior, but through the poetic word, as the poem concludes:

Asi con tal entender, todos sentidos humanos conseruados,

çercado de su muger, de sus fijos y hermanos y criados, dio el alma a quien ge la dio, el qual la ponga en el çielo en su gloria,

y avnque la vida murio, nos dexo harto consuelo su memoria.

— Coplas por la muerte de su padre, vv. 479–480.

The meter adopted, the copla de pie quebrado, lends the poem, in the words of Azorín in Al margen de los clásicos, a great sententiousness and a broken, funereal rhythm like the funeral toll of a bell. The biblical inspiration comes from Ecclesiastes and the Moral Commentaries on the Book of Job by Saint Gregory. The fatalism of the medieval commonplaces of ubi sunt, vanitas vanitatum and homo viator also resounds. A critical edition of the Coplas by Vicenç Beltrán is currently available. The oldest witnesses of the Coplas a la muerte de su padre come from the cancioneros of Baena, Egerton and Oñate-Castañeda, as well as from the first editions, those of Pablo Hurus and Antón de Centenera. They were glossed by countless authors (Alonso de Cervantes, Rodrigo de Valdepeñas, Diego Barahona, Jorge de Montemayor, Francisco de Guzmán, Gonzalo de Figueroa, Luis de Aranda, Luis Pérez and Gregorio Silvestre) and even earned the honor of a translation into Latin. Their influence is felt in great poets such as Andrés Fernández de Andrada, Francisco de Quevedo and Antonio Machado. They were translated into French by, among others, Guy Debord, the influential author of The Society of the Spectacle, as Stances sur la mort de son père

The metrical resources of his poetry favor short forms over the vast compositions called decires. The rhyme is at times not very carefully crafted. He does not overuse learned words and prefers plain language, in contrast to poets such as Juan de Mena and the Marquis of Santillana and, in general, the cancionero poetry of his time; this is a trait that sets the author considerably apart in an era when courtly pretension led cancionero lyric poets to display their wit through a premature conceptismo or by demonstrating their learning through the Latinizing of the Allegorical-Dantesque school.

Jorge Manrique's style heralds Renaissance clarity and balance. The expression is plain and serene, accompanied by similes, as is proper to the sermo humilis or humble style, the natural and common style of didactic literature. There are even vulgarisms, which lend an air of simplicity and sobriety, and which fit perfectly into the rhetorical techniques and wordplay typical of fifteenth-century poets. On the other hand, the importance given to the life provided by fame and worldly glory, as opposed to the medieval ubi sunt, is also a trait of anthropocentrism that heralds the Renaissance.

The communicative force that Jorge Manrique achieves in the Coplas is very powerful. In his verses he introduces themes that had already been treated before: death and the ephemeral, but he does so by endowing each stanza with enormous beauty, achieving a poem of extraordinary uniformity and unity.

Alan Deyermond points out that the Coplas are, moreover, a reflection of society from a critical perspective toward the frivolities and vanities of his time. They speak of life at court, of the masculine world and the decline of chivalry, of women and the development of the salons, of various festivities and of 15th-century Castile.

Jorge Manrique in Spanish literature

The work of Jorge Manrique has left its mark on many later authors who have shown great interest in and admiration for his poetry, especially for the Coplas por la muerte de su padre. His verses have been extensively recreated and have endured through time as a source of inspiration.

Justa fue mi perdición

Some of his compositions were sung and highly celebrated by posterity. The song Justa fue mi perdición was widely disseminated with music by Juan de Urrede in the 16th and 17th centuries and is one of the most famous courtly love songs of the Golden Age. Evidence of this are the numerous documentary sources in which it has survived: fourteen manuscripts that mention it and more than forty different printed editions in which it is copied or glossed.

The text of this song is preserved in the Cancionero General, in the musical cancioneros Cancionero de Palacio and Cancionero de Segovia, and in other non-musical manuscript and printed cancioneros. It also appears glossed in manuscript and printed cancioneros, both collective and individual, and quoted or alluded to in works in prose and verse. It is glossed by authors such as Juan Boscán, Juan Fernández de Heredia, Andrade Caminha, Luis Vaz de Camoens, Joaquín Romero de Cepeda, Gregorio Silvestre and Francisco de Borja. Lope de Vega mentions it in La Dorotea and in the plays La prueba de los ingenios and Porfiar hasta morir.

The wide dissemination of Justa fue mi perdición during this period is not, however, directly related to Jorge Manrique's personal fame, since the documents in which it is preserved barely mention his name.

Musical versions of the Coplas

From the 1540s onward, renowned musicians of the 16th and 17th centuries composed musical versions of Jorge Manrique's Coplas por la muerte de su padre. Six versions survive today, composed by Alonso Mudarra, Luis Venegas de Henestrosa, Juan Navarro de Sevilla, Pere Alberc i Vila, Melchor Robledo and Francisco Guerrero. In addition, there is evidence of two other versions by Philippe Rogier and Gabriel Díaz Bessón, now lost. Some of these musical versions of the Coplas must have been well known to the public of the time, since they were sung in the corrales de comedias and at the Corpus Christi festivities.

Jorge Manrique in the Golden Age

Manrique's glossers were very numerous in the Golden Age, and surely no learned poem of the 15th century inspired as many composers of this period as the Coplas did. Lope de Vega went so far as to say of this poem, in the prologue to El Isidro, that «it deserved to be written in letters of gold».

Manrique's work is present in classical Spanish theater, sung or glossed. Lope mentions it in La Dorotea and in two plays: La prueba de los ingenios and Porfiar hasta morir. Also in La devoción del Rosario, a comedia dated between 1604 and 1615.

The Generations of '27 and '98 and Jorge Manrique

Monument to Jorge Manrique in Paredes de Nava.

The members of the Generation of '98 Miguel de Unamuno, Ramiro de Maeztu, Azorín and Antonio Machado approached Jorge Manrique each in his own particular way, but all with great affection for the Castilian poet.

Unamuno, in his Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, takes up six verses of the Coplas for the episode of the death of Don Quixote. Also in his Cancionero he recalls Jorge Manrique as a figure and creator in the poem Al pasar por Carrión de los Condes.

Maeztu appreciates and comments affectionately on Manrique's verses in his acceptance speech at the Real Academia Española, defending and praising the Coplas. Throughout his speech, Maeztu speaks of the theme of the brevity of life and its presence in Castilian lyric poetry. He presents Manrique as a fully influential man and an example of literary sobriety and simplicity

Azorín attempts to portray Manrique's spirit: «Jorge Manrique... What was Jorge Manrique like? Jorge Manrique is something ethereal, subtle, fragile, brittle. Jorge Manrique is a light shiver that seizes us for a moment and makes us think. Jorge Manrique is a gust that carries our spirit away, toward an ideal distance». He presents us with a Manrique «brought back to life» who still remains at our side today.

Jorge Manrique is the favorite poet of Antonio Machado: «Among my poets / Manrique has an altar», he says in his poem Glosa. Machado was a glosser of Manrique, and Manrique's inspiration can clearly be seen in several of his poems. He deeply appreciates in the medieval poet his simple creation around everyday things, and his admiration goes so far as to give his last and mysterious love the name of Manrique's wife, Guiomar.

For the poets of the Generation of '27, Jorge Manrique was also the most esteemed medieval poet. Luis Cernuda describes him as a «metaphysical poet». Jorge Guillén titles the second book of his work Clamor with a verse by Manrique, Que van a dar en la mar. Pedro Salinas devotes a fundamental study to him, the essay Jorge Manrique, o, tradición y originalidad, where he describes the figure of the poet as follows:

It is certainly not the conceptual content of the Coplas, invented and formulated before by many. Nor is the metrical form of the Coplas his own invention. One must find, then, his personality in his treatment of that past, in his attitude toward tradition. That is what, in my view, defines the poetic figure of Jorge Manrique.

— Pedro Salinas

Manrique Triangle

For more than twenty years, the towns of Castillo de Garcimuñoz, where he was mortally wounded, Santa María del Campo Rus, where he died, and Uclés, where he was buried, all in Cuenca, have commemorated on the last Saturday of April the Jornadas Manriqueñas, which rotate from one town to the next, and in which the highlight of the events is always a speech on the figure of Jorge Manrique.

Bibliography

• Alvar, Carlos and Lucía Megías, José Manuel (eds.), Diccionario filológico de literatura medieval española. Textos y transmisión, Madrid, Castalia, 2002.
• De Lama, Víctor, «Fama póstuma de Justa fue mi perdición, canción atribuida a Jorge Manrique», pub. in Actas del V Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, Vol. II, 1995, pp. 532–533, Universidad de Granada.
• De Lama, Víctor, and Gerardo Fernández, «Fortuna musical de las Coplas de Jorge Manrique en los Siglos de Oro», Actas del VI Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, vol. II, Alcalá de Henares, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá, 1997, pp. 867–878.
• Deyermond, Alan, Historia de la literatura española, I, La Edad Media, Barcelona, Ariel, 1991.
• Díez de Revenga, Francisco Javier, «Jorge Manrique y la Generación del 98», Revista de literatura española, hispanoamericana y teoría de la literatura, vol. 54, 1976, pp. 4–14.
• López Agurleta, José. La kalenda de Uclés, in Archivo Histórico Nacional, Códice L. 1004. See Salas Parrilla, Miguel. Castillo de Garcimuñoz en la historia de España, p. 47.
• Manrique, Jorge, Poesía. Edition, study and notes by Vicenç Beltrán [1992]. Madrid: Real Academia Española, Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg-Círculo de Lectores, 2013.
• Manrique, Jorge, Poesías completas, edited by Miguel Ángel Pérez Priego, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 2014.
• Pérez Priego, Miguel Ángel, «Apuntes sobre la presencia de la literatura medieval en la poesía contemporánea», Revista de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales, no. 10, 2000, pp. 361–384.
• Salinas, Pedro, Jorge Manrique, o, tradición y originalidad [1947], Barcelona, Ediciones Península, 2003.
• Serrano de Haro, Antonio, Personalidad y destino de Jorge Manrique, Madrid, Editorial Gredos, 1996.

External links

• Literary analysis of the Coplas a la muerte de su padre (pdf, in Spanish).
• Entry on Jorge Manrique at the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library.
• Digitized works in the Hispanic Digital Library of the National Library of Spain.
• «Jorge Manrique», episode of the TVE series Paisaje con figuras (November 15, 1984).